so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about cw and how great it is and i want to learn but every time i look it up i get totally different advice and i dont know where to start. some people say learn with a straight key, some say paddle right away, some say dont even touch a key until you can copy in your head. theres like a million apps and websites and i have no idea which ones are actually good vs just whatever comes up first in google. i can recognize maybe like 5 letters but that took me forever and im not even sure i learned them the right way. does anyone have a method that actually worked for them, like a specific order to learn the letters or something

okay so the thing that finally made it click for me after years of trying is just -- stop trying to memorize the dots and dashes. like seriously forget the visual pattern stuff. what you want to do is associate each letter with a sound, not a pattern on paper. the way i did it was with the koch method, which starts you with just two characters at full speed, like real speed not slow, and you dont move on until you can copy them reliably. there's a free program called lcwo.net that does exactly this and its honestly the best thing ive found. it feels painfully slow at first because youre just sitting there copying K and M over and over but it actually works. the idea is your brain learns the rhythm of each letter as a sound not a code you have to decode, and thats how experienced ops do it in their head.

for how long to practice, short sessions every single day beats long sessions once a week by a lot. even 15 minutes is fine. and dont worry about the key yet, just work on receiving first, thats the hard part anyway

i was in the same boat like a year ago and honestly just downloaded morse mania on my phone and messed around with it during lunch breaks. its not perfect but it got me knowing the alphabet at least. the key thing i wish someone told me earlier is dont try to learn everything at once, i kept trying to memorize all 26 letters in a week and it just didnt stick. also hamcram.com or was it hamtest.online, one of those has some cw practice audio files i think, or maybe thats a different site i cant remember exactly